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- Green Deal Projects Support Office
The global climate crisis is not only an ecological crisis but an economic, social, and political crisis, with devastating impacts for individuals and societies. Furthermore, these impacts are not evenly distributed within societies and poorer, marginalised, and vulnerable groups tend to be the most acutely affected, which further exacerbates existing socio-economic inequalities.
The European Green Deal – a set of policy initiatives to make the EU climate neutral in 2050 – will bring changes to all areas of life. It could help achieve the potential outcomes of the green transition, including the creation of new jobs, the improvement of health and wellbeing, and the prevention of, and solution to inequalities and challenges, such as socio-economic inequalities, and social exclusion. Nevertheless, the green transition may lead to additional challenges for vulnerable groups, including lower income households, whose expenditure primarily comprises essential services such as energy, transport, and housing. As a result, the European Green Deal stresses that the transition towards climate neutrality must be fair and inclusive with the needs and desires of European people at its core and provide support to those who will face the greatest challenges.
To achieve this, the EU has developed the Just Transition Mechanism (JTM), a tool to address the social and economic effects of the transition. The JTM provides targeted support to the regions, industries, and workers who will face the greatest challenges from the transition by helping to mobilise around EUR 55 billion over the period 2021-2027 to address its socio-economic impacts. This is achieved through 1) a new Just Transition Fund, 2) an InvestEU ‘Just Transition’ scheme, and 3) a new Public Sector Loan Facility. The JTM will thus benefit and protect people in the most vulnerable regions, companies, and sectors active in or comprising carbon-intensive industries, as well as Member States and regions with a high dependence on fossil fuels and carbon intensive industries.
Green Deal Call-Funded Projects and their role in delivering a just and inclusive Green Deal
Under the Horizon 2020 Green Deal Call (GDC), the EU is funding five projects – ACCTING, COMPAIR, PHOENIX, REAL DEAL, and SHARED GREEN DEAL – that are conducting research into the socio-economic challenges of the transition. Their research includes how to enhance inclusivity, promote participation, facilitate co-design, and instigate behavioural, social, and cultural change across Europe. With the support of the European Green Deal Projects Support Office (GDSO), the projects are working towards the common objective of a fair transition to a climate neutral Europe.
ACCTING
The ACCTING project undertakes research to understand the impact of European Green Deal policies and initiatives on vulnerable groups, and to produce knowledge and innovations that empower policymakers to advance behavioural change at the individual and collective level. Building on previous research initiatives, ACCTING uses an interdisciplinary conceptual and methodological framework, inspired by strategic policy design-thinking. The project collects new data on European Green Deal policy interventions to identify the impact these have at the individual, community, organisation, and societal level, and identifies recommendations to mitigate the effects of the interventions.
ACCTING conducted an extensive mapping and comparative analysis exercise of 150 bottom-up environmental initiatives across 34 countries, which involved conducting interviews with 401 individuals from vulnerable groups. The results were disseminated in a report which highlights case-studies that demonstrate the positive involvement of society, and more specifically, vulnerable groups in their response to climate change. This was followed by 41 experimental studies related to eight thematic research lines (Climate Action, Biodiversity, Clean Energy, Farm to Fork, and Sustainable Mobility), each reflecting a different area of European Green Deal policy. The studies helped to identify problematic behaviours and the most vulnerable groups and linked them to existing bottom-up initiatives. The results of this work informed workshops, where participants from various fields were brought together to interpret the data and co-create innovative and actionable solutions that improve European Green Deal policies.
Figure 1. ACCTING framework based on two research and innovation cycles. Click to view large image. Source: The project - ACCTING
ACCTING has identified 10 pilot actions that address the challenging areas of European Green Deal Policies (e.g. vulnerable regions, social groups, sectors etc.). These actions relate directly to the project’s eight thematic research themes and cover various topics, such as wildfire management, biodiversity conservation, energy communities, micro-entrepreneurs, environmental sustainability, community gardens, food initiatives, bike use/cycling activism, supporting green initiatives and student volunteering.
The project has also produced two policy briefs and a research agenda, which presents the research gaps identified within the framework of European Green Deal policies. You can read more about these outputs on the project’s website.
ACCTING is providing an in-depth knowledge of the impact of European Green Deal policies on vulnerable groups, and at the same time, is involving stakeholders in the co-creation of policy solutions.
The four main impacts of ACCTING’s work are:
Highlighting the impact of the European Green Deal on vulnerable groups and identifying early-on new forms of discrimination and inequality within society.
Empowering policymakers to take measures that alleviate or mitigate any adverse effects of decisions associated with the European Green Deal that impact vulnerable groups and inequalities.
Promoting initiatives adopted by citizens and NGOs that involve society and, more specifically, vulnerable groups, and using these initiatives to help adapt their behaviour towards climate change.
Developing new bottom-up initiatives that have a positive impact on the inequalities and discriminations, and inspiring policymakers and other stakeholders to roll them out and develop them further.
COMPAIR
The COMPAIR project aims to encourage citizens to monitor, understand and change their environmental impact, showing them how behavioural change on their part can improve their environmental footprint and help improve air quality. Moreover, community insights provided by citizens will enable policy makers to make more informed decisions when enacting policy change. It unlocks the power of the public, including people from vulnerable groups, to provide data around the central theme of air quality. This data can complement and improve official datasets and make new information available to help to meet environmental objectives.
The project has a special focus on women, young people, and hard-to-reach groups, and empowers them to use a Citizen Science Lab to co-design and undertake environmental scientific experiments that address their local environmental challenges. By providing innovative, self-assembly, low-cost sensors, dynamic dashboards and augmented-reality tools, anyone, regardless of their background, can collect, observe, and extract actionable intelligence from data to understand their impact on the environment and explore ways to reduce it.
Beyond helping to mitigate bad environmental habits at an individual and community level, COMPAIR uses Citizen Science (CS) data to mutually enrich other public and private data sources used in official city decision-making platforms. It aims to increase civic engagement and enable in more effective long-term environmental policy. To enhance the value of this CS data, COMPAIR has developed a Policy Monitoring Dashboard (PMD) – a new visualisation and analytics platform (see Figure 2). The PMD can monitor a target location and the surrounding areas to ensure that a policy change does not simply shift the problem elsewhere.
COMPAIR has piloted studies in the Region of Flanders and in Athens, Berlin, and Sofia. A collective approach to evidence gathering was applied, which ensured high levels of trust and inclusivity between grassroot communities, researchers, industry experts and policy makers who worked side by side to make the vision of zero pollution a reality. For more information on the outcomes of these pilots, please read the reports on their website.
Figure 2. COMPAIR Policy Monitoring Dashboard PMD (left) and pilot study locations (right). Source: Compair Dashboard (left), Experiments COMPAIR (right)
PHOENIX
The PHOENIX project has the objective of studying, testing, and enriching participatory and deliberative practices developed to improve the European Green Deal pathway. In particular, the project follows the idea that the ecological transition will only be successful if it is fair and inclusive, involving citizens, through commitment and active participation. More specifically, the project tests participatory methodologies in seven European countries, and includes 11 pilots, at the national, regional, and local level.
Figure 3: PHOENIX Pilots, levels, and locations. Source: PHOENIX Pilots
The project identified participatory practices through the PHOENIX Tangram, which is a system of methodologies which is combined with specific context-related aspects and creates customised participatory practices. Each new Tangram is then shared with the Territorial Commission for Co-Design (which includes citizens, stakeholders, and local representatives) which then decide whether to apply each new methodology in a pilot. Firstly, PHOENIX is using a social simulation tool in order to communicate directly with local partners and pilots, in order to discuss factors that impact attitudes and behaviours of individuals, and the willingness of citizens to participate. Secondly, the project is also using spatial microsimulation tools, in order to outline the sentiments of European citizens regarding climate change issues. Thirdly, a Self-Social Mapping tool is being used, enabling citizens to express their opinions and share their knowledge on territorial issues. The fourth tool used by the project is the Collective Ecosystem toolkit promotes social learning and facilitates the dialogue and relationship between human activities and the environment. Lastly, the project uses the Empaville game, a role-playing game which simulates a gamified Participatory Budgeting process within a fictional city called Empaville, combining in-person deliberation and digital voting. In particular, this is used by the partners of the consortium for the implementation of the pilots, to extend the project’s impact beyond its established territories.
REAL DEAL
The REAL DEAL project is co-creating a new model for environmental citizenship across Europe, placing meaningful citizen participation at the heart of the European Green Deal. Gender equality is embedded into the project’s DNA, with specific attention on the ‘leave no one behind’ principle, to ensure the engagement of groups disproportionally burdened by environmental damage.
The REAL DEAL project brings together researchers and practitioners from a wide range of disciplines (including law, responsible innovation, geography, and sustainability studies) as well as civil society organisations from related backgrounds (environment, climate, women, youth, etc) in order to tackle challenges associated with the European Green Deal transition. The project is testing the effectiveness of various deliberative formats and tools, both at national and pan-European level. This has ranged from in-person, to digital and hybrid events hosted on their online platform (My Real Deal).
The project’s research focuses on policies related to ‘Just transitions and root causes of inequality across the EU’ as a means to achieve a REAL DEAL.
The core objective of the project is to increase the active participation of citizens and stakeholders around the European Green Deal. To achieve this, the project has produced a set of steps and a list of criteria (Figure 3) for meaningful citizen participation. The list of criteria emerged from a literature review of environmental frameworks and their approaches to meaningful citizen engagement. Currently the project is assessing its test cases against the above-mentioned criteria and is developing a protocol, recommendations, and guidance for the European Green Deal.
The project has also produced a policy brief, a handbook with country profiles, and a number of reports. For more detail on the project’s outputs see the publications, in the project’s website.
Figure 4. REAL DEAL criteria for meaningful citizen participation. Source: CEU Democracy Institute
SHARED GREEN DEAL
Social sciences & Humanities for Achieving a Responsible, Equitable and Desirable (SHARED) GREEN DEAL) brings together 22 leading organisations from across the EU to stimulate shared European Green Deal initiatives towards behavioural, social, and cultural change. SHARED GREEN DEAL provides Social Sciences and Humanities’ tools to support the implementation of initiatives in eight EU Green Deal policy areas locally and regionally. Research is directed at the ‘meso-level’ (workplace behaviour) to help bridge the gap between the ‘micro-level’ (individual experiences) and ‘macro-level’ (societal organisation). The project aims to encourage the roll-out of these initiatives by bringing together individual societal actors to exchange knowledge and to harness their collective experience. Outputs from these interactions are fed back into the ‘macro-level’ to stimulate policy-level change (Figure 5).
Figure 5. SHARED GREEN DEAL research framework levels. Source: SHARED GREEN DEAL
In partnership with SHARED GREEN DEAL, local and regional authorities and not-for-profit organisations are encouraged to perform social experiments that are focused around the eight priority European Green Deal areas: Clean Energy, Circular Economy, Efficient Renovations, Sustainable Mobility, Sustainable Food, Preserving Biodiversity, Climate Action, and Zero Pollution (Figure 6). By involving local stakeholders and citizens, the experiments aim to facilitate, as well as learn from, change processes at both individual and collective levels, whilst also collecting data in the process.
Project outputs have included the development of a tool (an online European Green Deal policy tracker), as well as translating the project findings into stakeholder-specific policy briefs and roundtable events.
Figure 6. Locations of SHARED GREEN DEAL social experiments in Europe. Source: Local Partners - SHARED GREEN DEAL
Conclusion
Growth rates of human population are set to exacerbate the impact of climate change on vulnerable, poor, and marginalised groups, regions, and sectors. The EU prioritises environmental initiatives that achieve a just and fair transition towards a climate-neutral Europe in 2050. Five EU-funded projects from the Horizon 2020 Green Deal Call aim to identify the groups that are disproportionately affected by European Green Deal policies and develop new initiatives to support and include them.
The five projects that are receiving funding from this Call – ACCTING, COMPAIR, PHOENIX, REAL DEAL, and SHARED GREEN DEAL – are helping to lay the foundations for an inclusive transition towards a climate-neutral economy. Their research has demonstrated how meaningful citizen participation can be achieved, and how behavioural, social, and cultural change can be encouraged.
The bottom-up initiatives that the five projects have developed and the research gaps that they have identified can contribute to adapting EU Green Deal policies to achieve a just and fair transition that leaves no one behind.
